Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Print Cosmetic Advertisements-under The Framework Of Appraisal Theory

With the high-speed development and all-round enrichment of modern science andtechnology, people gradually become aware that any communicating activity is inessence multimodal, which is different from the situation in the past with language asthe dominant medium. Recently this has led to the emergence of Multimodal DiscourseAnalysis (hereafter MDA) in the field of linguistics, which has expanded the domain oflinguistic study beyond the field of language in isolation to include the various modes,like sound, image, music, and gesture in TV programs, magazines and on the Internet.However, the previous studies have not attached sufficient importance to the evaluativemeaning contained in verbal and visual resources in print cosmetic advertisements aswell as their relationship. Therefore, the major objective of this thesis is to explore thecombination of MDA and Appraisal Theory (hereafter AT) while probing into theevaluative meaning of language and visual images and the application of MDA to theprint cosmetic advertisements. That is, this thesis is to concentrate on the evaluativemeaning of language and visual images appearing in the print cosmetic advertisementsand how the two modes cooperate and interact to realize the evaluative meaning as wellas their relationship in the process of meaning realization.The thesis, with thirty print cosmetic advertisements collected from magazinesand the Internet as its corpus and the Appraisal Theory developed by Martin and White(2005) as its rationale, gives a detailed analysis of verbal and visual resources fromattitude, engagement and graduation. In addition, Visual Grammar (hereafter VG)developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) is also employed mainly to interpret thevisual images.The whole thesis is composed of five chapters. The main content of each chapter islisted as following:Chapter One covers literature review, in which the author first concisely discussesprevious studies on print cosmetic advertisements both at home and abroad, and thenpresents the previous significant achievements made by both Chinese and westernresearchers in the field of multimodal discourse analysis, through which severaldrawbacks and gaps in the existing advertising studies are summarized and discussed.Chapter Two is one of the cardinal components of this thesis, which inquires into the framework of the present study—SFL (Holliday 1978, 1985, 1994), including theAPPRAISAL theory (Martin and White 2005/2008) and Visual Grammar (Kress andvan Leeuwen 1996). The former is employed to analyze the verbal resources appearingin a wide variety of print cosmetic advertisements, while the latter is used to construethe evaluative meaning arising from visual resources.Chapter Three provides the methodology of the present study, introducing theresearch questions, presenting the data collected and explaining how the study isconducted.Chapter Four is the nuclear part of this thesis, which carries out a detailed analysisof the evaluative meaning of PCA under the framework of the APPRAISAL theory andVisual Grammar. The research is done in two parts. One is focused on the verbalresources, probing into the profoundness of the evaluative meaning, especially thesystem of Attitude accorded to the resources, and the other concentrates on the visualimages appearing in the selected advertisements, which is aimed to dig out how theimages convey the evaluative meaning. These two parts are in no way isolate from eachother, which would be explained in detail following the analysis of the two modes.Chapter Five is the concluding part of the thesis, where main findings and basicarguments of this thesis are provided and the contribution and significance are summedup. The implications of this study for social and educational activities are revealed.Limitations of the present study are announced in this part, followed by suggestions forfuture studies.The significance of the study mainly lies in: Theoretically, the study is meant to bea constructive contribution to print cosmetic advertisements and an evaluativeapplication of visual grammar by conducting a comprehensive analysis of images inprint cosmetic advertisements within the framework of multimodal discourse analysis.Practically, it attempts to improve readers’capability in appreciating the advertisements,especially visual literacy, which can help them realize the real meaning and the purposeof the verbal and visual resources in print cosmetic advertisements, and it is alsoexpected to be a useful guide to advertisers’designing activities.